The Monitors

I had the pleasure to meet Dave Tompkins last weekend, whom I had invited for a lecture at a festival that I co-founded a few years ago. I highly recommend his book How To Wreck A Nice Beach that tells the story of the vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop with loads of fascinating detours.

If you ever chat with Dave, don't forget your notebook. I'm glad that I wrote down the name of the above clip which not only has a Bruce Haack meets Basil Kirchin soundtrack feat. a pretty early use of the vocoder (here's the clip with better sound but worse image), but is also a nice late entry to my TV-ident month from this spring.